animal - technology

I happened to be looking through the comics artist Anders Nilsen's blog (as compensation for not having read nearly enough of his print work), and came upon this eerie and beautiful image by his friend and collaborator Todd Baxter:

The encounter Baxter stages here - between the curious, gently nudging tapirs and the somewhat ridiculous shipwrecked astronauts, lumbering around with their age-of-plastic milk crate - reminded me of the recent finale of Battlestar Galactica, where space-age humans also find themselves, unexpectedly, in the midst of wild animals. But of course, I mean "reminder" only in the sense that Baxter's diorama is an elegant counter-example to the absurdly unreconstructed, colonial safari vision that BSG foisted upon us.

Here's another image I found on Baxter's own website:


Revised March 29, 2009, 2:21pm EST.

they have a plan

In its series finale, Battlestar Galactica revealed itself to be Journey of Man...

... and Out of Africa:


Here I thought the final season of BSG would be about letting go of old illusions - nationalist, civilizationalist, humanist - and about the difficult but necessary work of building a new society - one that would be human, cylon, hybrids thereof - from the rubble of mutual all-out war. Up until the end I thought the show was sticking to its guns: with the almost socialist-realist backdrop of 6's and 8's calking Galactica together with cylon resin; with the restructuring of political representation from the 12 colonies to the ships in the fleet, which also means the inclusion of cylons in the political process; with Adama ordering an altruistic mission to rescue the Pearl-like cylon-human child Hera from the bad (ethnic-absolutist) cylons. But no!

poodle ESP

An irresistible photo: from the archives of Duke Parapsychology Laboratory, now Rhine Research Center, subject of an interesting-sounding recent book.

RIP John Hope Franklin, 1915-2009

Duke has a nicely put-together memorial site that documents Dr. Franklin's life and work. The photo here is by Derek Anderson, from this 2007 Independent Weekly article.

Updated with water-marked image 3/29/09

random dog kitsch

$12.50 bobbleheads on display at the Mark Jacobson Toyota dealership in Durham (proceeds to go to the local Animal Protection Society).

sad animals

Adam Meuse, author of the wrily absurdist Sad Animals, is doing a signing at Chapel Hill Comics today. Besides the self-castigating sea horse below, some of my favorite panels feature a jelly fish thinking, "I think too much" and a tiny caterpillar, dangling from a tree, wondering if it's "living a lie."

dogs & public sentiment

Seen at a Durham restaurant, homemade flyers from the Coalition to Unchain Dogs (subject of this earlier blog entry):